Educating with a language barrier

Hello everyone! Last week we finished our last classes in the schools, so the project is almost over. After almost six months of going to, in total, seven different schools, I have noticed some similarities. Some things are the same in different schools, in various classes of different grades. There is one thing that stands out for me. In every new class that we went to, we always had to see what was the level of English of the students. All of our activities are in English, because we are not really Romanian experts, so to say.

Sometimes it was hard for us to make the students understand, because we didn’t know if they would be able to understand what we were trying to teach them. For the subject of our workshops though, it’s really important that the information is passed on correctly.

We were lucky actually, for most of the classes there was at least one student that knew English well enough to understand us. He or she would then translate to the classmates, in Romanian, and this way they could still understand.  The situation is not ideal, of course, but at least it worked out like this. 

One time we were in a class of ninth grade. I was surprised to see, actually, that almost none of them knew the English language well enough to communicate with us. Maybe they were too shy to speak in English. When actually there is no need to be shy, because for us English is not our mother language either. The teacher told us that this is really a problem for some of them, because they have the desire to study or work abroad, later in life. For the third module we did, the students would have to answer some questions on a paper, in English. In this particular class, this activity turned out to be too advanced, because of the language. So in the end, the English teacher, who was with us in the classroom, translated all the questions that were on the paper,  in Romanian. This way, the students would understand. In the end we weren’t really able to properly discuss their answers together, like we always do, but at least they had the possibility to understand something from the activity.

In conclusion, in the end we always managed, somehow, to make our students understand at least the general idea of our workshops. I think we all have learned from this, how to make ourselves understandable for people with only a small knowledge of English. It was worth the challenge.

-          Coco